Brilliant chronicler of the 1960s, Andrew Kopkind was a courageous, insightful and remarkably groundbreaking journalist always 'sniffing the zeitgeist' and pushing boundaries while covering race, civil rights, war and poverty. An openly gay man in an era when such freedom was sorely contested, he co-produced “Lavender Hour,” the first gay and lesbian variety program on American commercial radio with his long-time partner John Scagliotti. After obtaining degrees from Cornell University and the London School of Economics, he reported for Time, the New Republic, the Village Voice and many other publications before becoming Associate Editor of The Nation, America’s oldest continuously published weekly magazine. Kopkind wrote two books: America: The Mixed Curse (1969) and The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, an anthology of his writing published posthumously in 1995, edited by JoAnn Wypijewski. In 1974, Kopkind bought Tree Frog Farm in Guilford, Vermont, which became his and John Scagliotti's home and a gathering place for like minded journalists, filmmakers, and other culture makers -- like episode producer/narrator Maria Margaronis -- who shared Kopkind’s passion for social justice. When Kopkind died of cancer in 1994 at age 59, the Kopkind Colony was founded at Tree Frog Farm to remember his work. The Colony, under the continued direction of Scagliotti, Wypijewski and others, mentors journalists, filmmakers and community activists through a summer residency program and other activities that continue there today.
This episode was produced, edited and narrated by Maria Margaronis. Interviews were with John Scagliotti, JoAnn Wypijewski. Archival voice of Andrew Kopkind provided by producer. The parody of Lou Reed's 'Take a Walk on the Wild Side' was performed by Scagliotti and Kopkind on 'Lavender Hour' radio on WBCN Boston. The Allen Ginsberg excerpt was from Scagliotti's film 'Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community': https://www.firstrunfeatures.com/beforestonewall.html Executive Producer was LIssa Weinmann. Audio Mastering was by Guilford Sound with final podcast editing by Alec Pombriant.
See Andrew Kopdind's seminal work 'The Thirty Years’ Wars': 'Probably no better record exists of these landmark events than the vivid reflections collected in The Thirty Years’ Wars.”—Washington Post
See Tribute to Kopkind in The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/gutsy-radical-journalism-andy-kopkind-who-died-20-years-ago-week/
Gutsy, Groundbreaking, Gifted - Journalist Andrew Kopkind
HOST, LISSA WEINMANN: Welcome to the Brattleboro Word Trail Podcast.
ARCHIVAL VOICE OF ANDREW KOPKIND: I had no idea. I just thought these people were real heroes and there was a tremendous romanticism, something that was missing from my life and the SNIC workers and the black people from the counties. You know, and we will just go hang out and check on these (voice fades)
MARIA MARGARONIS, NARRATOR: (fading in over Andrew’s voice) great radical journalist, friend, mentor, cook and so much more…
ARCHIVAL ANDREW KOPKIND : (voice comes up again) so beautiful. So that was really part of some tremendously exciting, historic romantic moment when I was down there, (background voice says ‘and we were,’ laughter) and I was!”
MARIA: Andy’s political journey really began in Selma in 1965, reporting on the Movement for Black Freedom for the New Republic. Over the next 30 years, he wrote hundreds of powerful, graceful pieces for ramparts the New Statesman, the Boston Phoenix, the New York Review of Books, The Village Voice, The Nation. From the early 70s, he made his home a tree frog farm in Guilford with his partner, the filmmaker John Scaglioltti, with friends and comrades, writers and activists, waifs and strays. I was one of them. In fact, I probably fell into all those categories. What follows is just a taste of who Andy was and what he meant to us.
ARCHIVAL ANDREW KOPKIND RADIO SHOW: This is WCBN in Boston. It's not yet August, and already the first guns have been fired in the racial conflict, which threatens Boston this fall. The residents of Southie, particularly the young people there, enforce rules of apartheid so strict that they would surprise the most racist South Africans. Whites feel they can attack blacks who wander through white Southie without fear of arrest or even a serious reprimand. In fact, South Boston's white rabble rousers have seemed to praise and have certainly condoned the racist attacks of their compatriots.
MARIA: Not 2020, but 1975.
JO-ANN WYPIJEWSKI: What was striking about going through Andy's work was just how fresh most of the pieces remained.
MARIA: That’s writer Joanna Wypijewski she edited The 30 Years Wars, the the thick anthology of Andy's pieces, published after his death in 1994.
JO-ANN: Andy looked at everything with a sense of history and with the sense of the large question.
ANDREW KOPKIND: The way to fight racism is by a basic and radical redistribution of power. Economic, political and social power from the hands of the white majority to the black minority that are now the victims.
JO-ANN: Whatever was happening in the moment, he wanted to situate in a context that was thicker, richer and more telling. He was one of the great chroniclers of the 1960s, so everything was happening. There is a piece called All Systems Fail about the multiple disasters of 1967.
JOHN SCAGLIOTTI READING FROM ANDREW KOPKIND WORK: “Those who did not live before the revolution will never know how sweet life is,’ Talleyrand said. And perhaps for such knowledge, there is a desperate sweetness as the disaster spreads in the summer of the American crack up. Sgt. Pepper blares from 10 million photographs. They're feeding the bears in Yellowstone Park, and the odor of barbecue wafting over the suburbs is suddenly mixed with the fragrance of pot.”
JO-ANN: Something about that sets one from the backyard to the streets of America, to geopolitics to cultural politics, all in one fell swoop.
JOHN SCAGLIOTTI READING FROM ANDREW KOPKIND WORK: “Hear it! See it. Smell it while there is still time. Things are not likely to be so sweet again.”
MARIA:That was John's Scagliotti reading and his words. Their partnership was essential to Andy’s life and work. And Johns too. Here's Andy interviewing Allen Ginsberg for John's film “Before Stonewall.”
ARCHIVAL ANDREW FROM FILM: Did you feel that there was any kind of a gay community that was being formed during this era, too? That there was something uniting gay people and not only in terms of knowing, in terms of sexuality, but in terms of sensibility consciousness?
GINSBERG: “Yes, and frankness – that it was a community of frankness.”
MARIA: That word sensibility… Tell me what you feel that word meant for him.
SCAGLIOTTI: I think that it combined the issues with the culture, with history. Like, if you're gay, this is part of it. And then not only if you're gay. The history of being gay and everything that's happened in your culture about being gay is part of the sensibility.
RADIO VOICE OF ANDREW KOPKIND: And now back to part two of Lavender Hour…(light music comes up from archive)
MARIA: In 1973, Andy and John launched the first regular LGBT radio broadcast, an exuberant potpourri of liberated poetry, music and talk that became a lifeline for many gay people.
ANDREW KOPKIND VOICE (with strains of ‘On Wild Side’ music beneath): I know – we were in Amsterdam and some people passed the newspaper up and we asked them to translate it and they said ‘Reed and Bowie, Kings of Faggot Rock’
MARIA: … and took no prisoners.
KOPKIND/SCAGLIOTTI SINGING ON RADIO A PLAY ON SONG ‘WALK ON WILD SIDE’” Later Lou came from NYC / couldn't decide just what he'd be / a little straight, a little gay / anything that would pay, pay, pay / say hey, Lou, take a walk on the wild side / Come on, Lou / Take a walk on the wild side …
MARIA: For Andy, gay liberation was part and parcel, his particular part and parcel of the struggle between freedom and established power, whose twists and turns he described and lived and analyzed all his life. Here are the final lines of ‘After Stonewall’, one of the last pieces he published in the nation on the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in 1979.
SCAGLIOTTI READING KOPKIND’S WORK “Somewhere in the existential depths of the brawl of screaming transvestites were all the Freedom Rides, the anti-war marchers. The sit in is the smoke ins and beacons, the consciousness raising, the bra burning, the levitation of the Pentagon, the endless meetings and broken hearts. Not only that, but the years of gay men and lesbians locking themselves inside windowless, unnamed bars, writing dangerous anonymous novels and articles lying about their identity to their families, their bosses, the military suffering silently when they were found out hiding and sinking and winking at each other, or drinking and dying by themselves, and sometimes not often braving it out and surviving. It's absolutely astonishing to think that on one early summer's night in New York, that world ended and a new one began.”
(interlude to part two focuses more on life at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford, VT)
NARRATOR MARIA MARAGONIS: Tree Frog from Gilford sometime in the late 20th century, Alice in Wonderland.
ARCHIVAL TAPE FROM A TREE-FROG FARM ‘ALICE IN WONDERLAND’ PLAY: Child, everything's got a moral, if only you can find it. And the moral of that… (laughter and talking of participants) Mazel tov, John….
JOHN SCAGLIOTTI: You know, Andy and I met when he had left his commune in Vermont. He came in ‘68 to live here. And then his commune became a woman's commune, having driven all the straight men away. And then we met in Boston, cruising in the Fenway, and he said, “Well, why don't we go and visit some of my friends in Vermont?” And for some reason, I just stayed with them, you know, 24 years? I mean, I know why. I mean, I was in love with them. But you know, it wasn't like, “Oh, I think we're a couple and I think I'm going to stay with you for the rest of my life, for the rest of your life” or whatever.
SONG FOLKY VOICES SINGING GRATEFUL DEAD’S ‘I KNOW YOU RIDER’
MARIA: For those of us who were lucky enough to talk and listen and garden and cook and dance a tree frog farm when we were young, the world Andy and John made was paradise. This is how my younger self described it at Andy's memorial 25 years ago, when it had barely begun to fade.
VOICE OF YOUNG MARIA: For the last 10 years, Tree Frog Farm has been the home I keep coming back to the closest I've come to Utopia, a gender and generationally liberated zone where you could garden all morning and talk all afternoon, held all the time in a warm web of running jokes and shared stories, a family brimming with love. And it taught us to mulch. To cook, to stand under waterfalls. To know the names of plants. To hang out with all kinds of different people and slip easily from one thing to another. Because, after all, everything's connected. And he taught us those things by welcoming us into his life with John, by showing us how to be there and be in it with the people you love. Obviously, none of us wanted it to end.
JOANN: John and I had harvested a bumper crop of peaches. The most spectacular pictures I have ever eaten were sitting on the front lawn, and each of us has a knife. We're cutting these peaches up for peach marmalade. And so we're sitting there and it's hot and it's summer and we're talking about Kopkind and what it would be like. So the juice of the peaches is running down our arms through our fingers over our knives. We're laughing. We're talking. It's serious. It's bittersweet. And it's sweet in every sense of the word.
MARIA: Joann is now the president of the Kopkind Colony, a multigenerational summer camp for journalists, activists and filmmakers that combine seminars and workshops with what we like to call radical relaxation.
JOHN SCAGLIOTTI: What we try to do with his living memorial was try to combine nature and understanding of your own heart and and your idealism and your intellectual wisdom in some way that had a real footing into your understanding of where you were.
JO-ANN: The thought was ‘How do we connect this spirit of the farm where you can talk about some of the most serious things and some of the hardest things in an environment that's beautiful, that's welcoming’. That's a delight because people always need a place to exhale.
MARIA: This is a very dark time we're in. And it's not that Andy's work or life on the farm was in any way blind to the darkness, but there was always a sense of energy and possibility, and in that energy itself is hope.
JO-ANN: Yeah, it's kind of a radical hope because, you know, everything is, you know, everything is awful, but you know, you have to be optimistic or you have to be hopeful because the opposite is unthinkable. I think if you can maintain a certain joy within you and if you can experience that with other people, then you can keep hope alive as Jesse Jackson would say, you can keep that sense in the imagination that is dark as things are. You know, they are the product often of human action. And so human action can at least theoretically, you know, reverse them. And so… we hope.
VOICE OF YOUNG MARIA: I want to end with Andy's words from 1968: “To be a revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to to struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering hope of a world to win.’
ARCHIVAL TAPE FROM TREE FROG FARM PLAY ALICE IN WONDERLAND: and the moral of that is ‘tis love, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round.
HOST: This episode was produced, edited and narrated by Maria Margaronis. Interviews were with JoAnn Wypijewski and John Scagliotti with archival voice of Andrew Kopkind and Allen Ginsberg. The parody of Lou Reed's 'Take a Walk on the Wild Side' was a clip from 'Lavender Hour' on WBCN Boston. The Allen Ginsberg excerpt was from the film 'Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community': https://www.firstrunfeatures.com/beforestonewall.html. Play quotes from 'Alice in Wonderland' by Louis Carroll. 'I Know You Rider' lyrics by the Grateful Dead. Executive Producer was me, LIssa Weinmann. Audio Mastering was by Guilford Sound with final podcast editing by Alec Pombriant. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council and the hundreds of volunteers and community members who support this work.
Thank you very much for listening – we hope you subscribe and look forward to seeing you next month on the Brattleboro Words Trail.